4.29.2006

Hand Restoration

One of the challenges about moving from Seattle to Champaign-Urbana (almost a year ago!) was the thought of having to give up Craig's List. In advance of moving, in fact, I started sending a steady stream of emails to Craig asking that he add "Chambana" to the site. Well, a few weeks after getting here—poof!—Chambana was added to the site.

The only down side is that locals have been slow to adopt Craig's list. There is already an active FreeCycle list in town. Plus, there's much less play and parody on our local hub of Craig's List than I'm used to—but you know, things can take a while to catch on.

I'll call it a restoration arts project, and what I particularly like about it is that the project focuses on the surplus of trashed and abandoned bicycles all over town.

Rusty old quick-release skewers like this one (rusted to an abandoned wheel)

are being refurbished by the artist to look like this:

Similarly, this rusty old pedal

has been refurbished to shine grandly as:

The ads, which you can find by looking at the entries that read REFURBISHED, all stipulate that the bikes are not owned by the refurbisher (totally clever!), but by paying twenty bones you get a map to the abandoned bike and a framed photo from the project.

4 comments:

Hey Spencer,Do you have any idea where/how a friend of mine could get a new seat post even though her old seat post has rusted onto her bike (a relic from the 70s, but nonetheless cherished for having been handed down by a since deceased friend).

In an interesting twist, craigslist users flagged a number of the posts as miscatagorized and even spam. They've been rewritten and moved to the general for sale section to clarify and avoid further complaints. Thanks for taking notice and interest.